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Smuggler's Tales

By

Bruno Maddox

Updated Feb. 26, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

Owing to a rather freewheeling prose style, and possibly also to the fact that it has been translated from Italian, there are passages in Luca Rastello's otherwise very readable account of the international cocaine trade that just don't make a whole lot of sense. One of them is its title: "I Am the Market." After interviewing a slew of big-league drug-runners, Mr. Rastello, a reporter for Rome-based La Reppublica, has woven their stories together into the true-but-fictional memoir of a single, composite smuggler—though why such a figure would ever think of himself as "The Market," as opposed to someone...